A fifteen-hour drive is superior to a two-hour flight by every measure worth measuring, according to a study released this week by the Institute for Directional Stubbornness.

“The two-hour flight is a fiction,” said lead researcher Dr. Marguerite Ansel, who has not boarded an aircraft since an unspecified disagreement over a boarding group. “It is two hours in the air. It is also ninety minutes to the airport, two hours before your gate, forty minutes on the tarmac, a rental counter, a shuttle, and a man named Gary who wants to talk about the shuttle. We calculated true door-to-door time at fourteen hours and fifty-one minutes.”

The drive takes fifteen.

“So we are discussing a difference of nine minutes,” Ansel said. “And in exchange for those nine minutes, you control the radio.”

The Institute’s 340-page report enumerates further advantages. The driver may consume snacks of a size and volume no authority has approved. No one requests that anything be switched to airplane mode, stowed, or raised to its full upright position. At any moment, without consulting a single employee, the driver may pull over at an establishment called The Big Cheese Barn.

“You cannot do that at 34,000 feet,” Ansel said. “We checked. We wrote and asked.”

Researchers concede certain drawbacks, chief among them that the journey lasts fifteen hours. The report addresses this in a footnote reading, in full: “Yes.”

The methodology has drawn admiration within the field. Investigators excluded any trip in which the driver arrived on time, rested, or willing to repeat the experience, on the grounds that such cases were unrepresentative of driving. Confidence intervals were described as “wide, but so is the interstate.”

Independent testimony was collected at hour eleven.

“I have achieved a clarity I have never once reached at cruising altitude,” said Terrence Whipple, 44, who drove from one place to a different place rather than accept a nonstop. “I know things now. I know what the country smells like between the parts of it people mention.”

Whipple could not identify which things he knows.

The Institute has already announced its follow-up, examining whether a twenty-six-hour drive outperforms a fifteen-hour drive.

“Early results are extremely promising,” Ansel said, from the car. “We simply have to keep driving.”